"Today, Sept. 15, Cassini crashed into Saturn after 13 years spent orbiting the ringed planet...Powered by plutonium the $3.9 billion spacecraft slingshotted around Venus twice and Earth once before traveling on to Jupiter to accelerate enough to reach Saturn in 2004. The spacecraft traveled 4.9 billion miles (7.9 billion kilometers) during its mission, circled Saturn 293 times, discovered six moons and observed dozens more. It dropped the European Space Agency's Huygens probe on Titan, the first-ever landing in the outer solar system.

[Opinion] The Copper-Wire World of AT&T: The Reason to Investigate AT&T, Now

[ It's all about fiber to the press release... ]The chart above is a summary of how AT&T has been manipulating the accounting of its mostly copper-based, state-based, utility networks. AT&T claims no one is using the networks and if they can ‘shut off the copper’, this time they will bring next generation wireless services, including 5G, to America. And to help AT&T et al. push this plan along, there is industry-created legislation, like the California bill, SB-649, as well as proceedings at the FCC. (SB-649 preempts state and city laws to put in ‘small cell’ wireless, with the claim it will replace (and shut off) the wired networks.) Read on:

'The core of the company’s innovation is quantum-dot laser technology that can transmit more data at lower cost, using significantly less power. First conceived at Bell Northern Research (predecessor to Nortel Networks), quantum-dot lasers are designed using self-assembling nanomaterials that exhibit unique behaviours referred to as “quantum effects.”

“Usually, lasers can generate only one wavelength,” Arabzadeh explains. Quantum-dot lasers, on the other hand, are made up of millions of nanoparticles of different sizes, with like-sized dots emitting their own wavelength of laser light. “What you end up with is many wavelengths coming from a single laser source.”

[...]

“It’s gone through its next phase of evolution with RANOVUS,” Arabzadeh says. “The laser would not work if deployed today on its own. What we have had to include is all the other things around it to make it work.” ' ______________________________________________

'Focusing on just the positive renewable energy news feels to me like cherry-picking climate hope. It's tempting, for sure, but can distract from what actually determines our climate fate: how much fossil fuel we burn. And by that measure we are still heading ever further from safety while our time to turn around is running out.'

That is an understatement. Current 'green' religion prohibits new hydropower or nuclear development which would be the best way to displace hydrocarbons.

As you are aware, I am not fan of the religious hysteria on and around CO2. My beef is that this obscures the reality of pollution issues caused by hydrocarbon use. In any event the hysteria on our current 1950's Nuclear technology is delaying real progress and has enabled conversion from coal to natural gas. This is the only real choice our laws and litigious society has left Utilities to use.

Yes, Natural gas is cleaner than coal, but what could we do with current Nuclear technology? A lot - there are many solutions today that create much safer environments than those used in the Soviet Union, Japan or at 3 Mile Island. Imagine crippling the renewable industry by stating they had to use technology that was from the same era as our current nuclear fleet.

For years I've posted about a transitional energy shortfall, and the need, then, for nuclear power. Links, later — but I agree.

In fairness, at least part of nuclear's problems rise from the current glut of natural gas, with consequent low prices: at present nuclear can't compete. But the glut won't last: so what then?

"As you are aware, I am not fan of the religious hysteria on and around CO2"

— Discord around the issue is an irresolvable problem. It replicates smoking/cancer debates in the 60's, complete with ideological biases, corporate misdirection, and public failure to understand probabilistic decisions, as opposed to probative and linear yes/no binary decisions. Different national/cultural biases toward prudence and common (global) good also play a part. These are clearly visible in different country trajectories.